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New MP3 License Terms Demand $0.75 Per Decoder
Posted by
chrisd
on Tue Aug 27, 2002 02:27 PM
from the good-thing-ogg-is-up-to-speed dept.
from the good-thing-ogg-is-up-to-speed dept.
Götz writes "The licensing terms of Thomson and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, who are the owners of the mp3 patents, have changed. Now not only mp3 encoders but also
mp3 decoders require a license. This page lists the fees -- it's $0.75 per decoder. As a consequence, Red Hat has already removed all mp3 players from the Rawhide development version."
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Thank god for ogg! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:5, Funny)
you want to cough up the $0.75?
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Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:5, Informative)
Re-rip your CD collection from scratch, and encode directly to
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Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:4, Informative)
Take for example making a photocopy of a passage from a book. You then take this photocopy and fax it to me. The quality degradation is that same that will happen when you transcode from MP3 to Ogg.
So if you have MP3s currently, either leave them as MP3, or re-rip them directly from the CD(You did pay for these songs, right?
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Re:Thank god for ogg! (Score:5, Informative)
You have been tricked. WMA is inferior quality but the encoder boosts the volume by 3 db which is known to make people think it sounds better.
Now I think that WMA does a better job for very low bitrate compared to mp3 (but of course ogg rules here) but WMA, overall, is inferior quality.
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Re:Fair use (Score:5, Funny)
Or, more specifically, if you give away turnip twaddlers. Or, possibly, if you use unlicensed turnip twaddlers in your commercial kitchen, and
have used them in the preparation of the twaddled turnips you have for sale.
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Re:Fair use (Score:5, Funny)
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What can MP3 do for me that Ogg Vorbis can't? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What can MP3 do for me that Ogg Vorbis can't? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Show your support for this petition then. (Score:5, Interesting)
As soon as an iPod with Ogg Vorbis is released, you can bet the rest of the mp3 player manufacturers will be scrambling to get it on their products.
Such is the power of Apple.
"Godzilla and Jaguar: Punch! Punch! Punch! Hit! Hit! Hit!
We die if they stop fighting for us."
Jet Jaguar Song, "Godzilla vs. Megalon"
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Portable Ogg-based players? (Score:5, Interesting)
If anyone knows of any portable players that support Ogg Vorbis, please post below! Thank You!
Re:Portable Ogg-based players? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Portable Ogg-based players? (Score:5, Insightful)
The user won't notice, most likely. However, if you notice, the minimum annual licensing is $15,000 US per year. So even if a manufacturer's product flops, they have to shell out 15 grand anyway. And if the product does well, say it ships 2 million units, that's $1.5 Million dollars in royalties.
When presented with those options, which one would you pick? Some people, especially much smaller companies, will go with the royalty-free solution.
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MiniDisc? (Score:5, Insightful)
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There outta be a law... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like we have the cart leading the horse. Inventors are now embedding their ideas into standards, waiting until adoption, and then enforcing their monopoly.
This is dirty pool, and I hope it doesn't last.
Re:There outta be a law... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is dirty pool, and I hope it doesn't last.
I agree with you completely. Unfortunately, I think it will last. We, as techies and as citizens, will need to more vigilant determining what we will adopt as 'standard'.
JPG, GIF, MP3, etc. We have to learn the lesson eventually.
More evidence to oppose the W3C RAND lisencing proposal.
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What about overseas distributions? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pass it on (Score:4, Interesting)
What? You don't agree? Well, my time's worth the $3. If they charged $10 per decoder, I'd still probably pay it - and in fact, that's the only mistake I think they're making, not charging enough. Because while I'd gladly pay $3 today, they should realize that going forward, I won't rip a single song in MP3 format. They'll make short-term revenues by screwing guys like me, but they're digging a hole in the long run.
Hmm. Not bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, they're profiteering, but they're profiteering off of a format they helped produce and thought to patent. MP3 encoding isn't exactly no duh stuff like hyperlinks or LZW compression (which is essentially a really fast look up table). And sure, there's Ogg, but I don't like the sound as much and my consumer devices don't support it.
You can bitch and moan about how this will kill mp3, but I think it's obvious nothing will kill MP3 -- the technology is too widely supported. What it means, though, is that GPL'd and other free decoders are going to have to ammend the license to be sure Fraunhoffer gets its money. This is a perfect time to test whether or not the GPL can play nice in the IP pool.
Re:Hmm. Not bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, are you going to donate the $60K to SPI so that Debian can redistribute xmms? I'd guess not. This won't kill MP3, but it will kill MP3 with free software. Oh well...
Yes, the have the patent, and the right to license the patent as they choose. Their choice (make it free until it's widely used, then start charging money) makes them assholes. This is exactly what happens when you start relying on patented technology, and proves that the folks over at Xiph were right all along.
As far as $0.75/per unit being trivial, you should investigate the economics of consumer electronics. That $0.75 might well be half the profit on a low-end device.
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Heh (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I'm wondering if the RIAA didn't pressure the owners of the patent into doing this, but that's beside the point. The point is, just because something that was free now costs money doesn't mean it's going to vanish overnight. Most people will download a single MP3 player and use that, and 75 cents is a negligible amount in the scheme of iPod pricing.
The way around this, of course, is for a company to write the update to their software, and release it as a program that will patch the executable file, rather than release a whole new file. The fee applies to decoders, not software that modifies the decoders.
Ogg Vorbis is great, it's free, and I hope they add support for it into the iPod and iTunes, but it's still going to be a long time before a format as deeply-entrenched as MP3 disappears.
(Reversing your logic would mean that MS Windoze would cease to be the standard simply because Linux is free.)
The far side of patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, one could convincingly argue that software patents shouldn't be allowed in the first place, or that they should have shorter terms, or that the patent office doesn't do a competent job of checking for obviousness or prior art. I'd probably agree. But the fact remains that any damage done by patents is at worst a temporary setback to everyone else, not an irretrievable disaster.
At some point, MP3s will no longer be encumbered by patents.
Re:The far side of patents (Score:5, Insightful)
And that is way to much time to wait for a patent to expire... [and effectivelly kills the usability of the technology or the patent system].
Cheers...
P.S.- I'm not against software patents (per si), just against stupid patents and the patent expiration time...
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Re:The far side of patents (Score:5, Insightful)
First, patents were orginally keyed to the length of your working life. You would spend decades becoming a master of your field, then a patent would protect you during the remainder of your working life. Meanwhile your apprentices would learn this new skill, then extend the art as they became masters.
That worked fine until Britain changed the length of patents to 100 years, to protect some key industries. The net result was that the British industry stalled while Germany (a nation of scofflaws that ignored British IP rights) went from an agarian society to an industrial one.
In this field, your working life is closer to 15 years, with maybe 5 years from your first paying job to when you're (usually) considered to be a fully competent journeyman capable of being "the master" at most reasonably complex shops. The high end is softer, but there's definitely a bias against older programmers. You start to notice it at 35, and it's a real problem at 40.
By this measure, a patent should last maybe 7-10 years, max. Long enough to drive a generation or two of your product, but not so long that a person who just started out when you got your patent can't build on it during their working lifetime.
But this brings up the second point - copyrights used to have a reasonable limit, but for all practical purposes they're now essentially eternal. Maybe the law won't extend the term of copyrights yet again, but I probably won't live long enough for anything written during my lifetime - or even substantially before it - to enter the public domain.
If this stands, I expect to see patent law soon follow. This might be tolerable if patents covered legitimate innovations, but not with the current Patent Office of approving virtually every patent that crosses their desk and letting the courts decide which ones are valid.
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Like the (updated) saying goes (Score:4, Funny)
Where's the facts? (Score:5, Interesting)
The definition of irony... (Score:5, Funny)
The minimum's the kicker for me... (Score:4, Informative)
US$ 15 000.00 per calendar year.
Now that's a pain. I emailed them to see if I could get a "hobbyist license" for more per app, but without the $15k minimum (wanted to make "iTunes 3 for Classic Mac OS"). They allow you to release up to 5000 units of a game that uses mp3s royalty free, so I was hopeful. The reply? No dice. (I was impressed they sent a reply!)
Fwiw, here's a list of the licensees [mp3licensing.com].
Be Afraid (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm already seeing a ton of songs in
Mp3 is still the most dominant format but I honestly don't think
--
Garett
Could be worse. (Score:5, Informative)
1. This is an open standard. It's just patented. Patents expire. Nobody is trying to prevent you from writing decoders - they just want to get paid for (I hope) work that they did in developing the technology, which is pretty cool, and which I don't think I could have invented on my own. I am not fond of software patents, but a patent on MP3 is not the same as a patent on one-click or xor cursors.
Compare this to, for example, Real Media player, where the file format isn't *patented* - it's a trade secret. So if Real doesn't support your platform, you can't play real media. This is really awful - much worse than the patent situation with mp3.
2. The royalty is quite reasonable. If you had to pay $0.75 for your copy of WinAMP, would that really seem unfair to you? That's the price of a can of coke, for Pete's sake! It it really that unfair?
3. Like it or not, this is not going to kill MP3, because most MP3 players are commercial, licensed products, and there are a ton of them out there, and they don't support Vorbis. So you don't have to do anything to keep using your MP3s, but if you want to use Vorbis in protest, it's going to be very difficult.
4. I have a large library of audio files that need to get published on the net. They're free, noncommercial, non-revenue-generating. I'll publish them at least in MP3 format, and maybe Ogg if I can get a good encoder. I have a feeling that if I publish Ogg, it's not going to get downloaded very much, but it'll be interesting to see.
Hold the phone. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that I've finally gotten a chance to comment.. (Score:5, Informative)
First off, like somebody said, this has always been the case, but there was no enforcement. So it's really not new.. As far as hardware players, a LOT of them use chips made by other companies (like TI or whatever). Now, I would think that TI would have to pay, not the company selling the MP3 players made with the device.. so then they charge the company making the player with their device an extra $0.75 and so on until you pay when you get the player. And being such a big company like TI or the others that make MP3 decoding chips, I would think they would have worked out patent stuff before, and since they were charging (just not enforcing) I bet that this is already happening.
The real bind is when it comes to software, and they've been doing this with encoding, and stuff like BLADE and LAME are still around and kicking, so I don't see why things like XMMS and mpeg123 would be effected.. I think RedHat's move is silly, but that's just me.
Xiph's reply (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Do they not realize the effect of this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Do they not realize the effect of this? (Score:5, Informative)
What's new is that the longstanding royalty exception for free software / freeware programs has been removed. I can't find any historical info on the exception from the mp3 licensing site (probably because Fraunhofer isn't eager to publicize the fact that there once was an exception), but if you look in other places like the Debian mailing lists [debian.org], you can read what the old policy was.
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Re:Do they not realize the effect of this? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they don't charge they have zero revenue. Charging $0.75 a decoder or $50k to $60 one time fee isn't that big of a deal for commercial companies making decoders. The only ones this hurt is the open source and free decoders, and they aren't making money from those anyway.
I agree that charging fees after the format is underhanded, and possibly grounds for anti-trust violations, but giving it away for free isn't exactly a great business decision either.
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Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please. (Score:5, Informative)
/Janne
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Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please. (Score:5, Informative)
Almost certainly, yes. An encoder would use a different strategy to encode a 128 kbit MP3 and a 192 kbit MP3. If certain frequency ranges are discarded when encoding 128 kbit, and other frequency ranges when encoding 192kbit, if you encode to 128kbit, and decode/recode to 192kbit, you will lose both ranges of frequencies.
why wouldn't you be able to produce an ogg from an mp3 that is no worse than the mp3?
See above.
I just don't buy the blanket argument that lossy -> lossy has to produce even more lossy.
Depends on the nature of the lossiness, grasshopper.
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Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please. (Score:5, Informative)
I've just gotten into this (ignored the MP3 bandwagon), but my plan is to use flac, a lossless encoder, then re-enc to the lossy format de jour as needed.
-Peter
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Re:i'm lazy, spell it out please. (Score:5, Informative)
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Lawsuit waiting to happen? (Score:5, Funny)
Odd, sueing someone over the IP of something that has caused more IP problems than anything else in history.
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this IS a change from before (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. Or, rather, right, but wrong with respect to a very technical point that has escaped notice so far.
Previously decoders which were released for free for personal use were exempt [debian.org] from the licensing fees. This covers winamp, xmms, mpg123, and all the other free software players you love.
That exemption has been removed. Now everything costs 75 cents, no matter whether it's free software or not. And that, my friend, is a big deal.
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Re:These prices were up last year. (Score:4, Informative)
This is just another case of
Actually, you are incorrect; the editors did not do anything wrong in this case. While the rates have been around, they were lower previously. Take a look at the previous royalty page courtesy of the Wayback Machine [archive.org].
I also have a feeling that if they are going to increase the rates, they are going to make a point of charging for the royalty fees as well.
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Re:They've got a good racket going... (Score:5, Insightful)
People take mp3s for granted now, but the patents involved cover real innovation, not bullshit like the one-click Amazon patents, or such.
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Want to play your mp3 CDs in a few years? (Score:5, Informative)
MP3 only came up because it was available at low-to-no-cost. Regarding some of the patents, of course. Nobody would've had used it if they had charged this decoder fee from the very beginning, and they know!
Do what I am going to do: Write a letter (paper!) to Fraunhofer and Thomson and explain your concerns.
Yes, I know about Ogg Vorbis and stuff, but there's no reason not to protest against changed mp3 licenses.
I don't want to re-compress all my mp3s to Ogg because this will reduce quality. So I will still have mp3s around in several years (don't mention all those CDs I burned). So this is an issue, since I will need a player/decoder to access them.
Contact Fraunhofer:
Fraunhofer Institut für Integrierte SchaltungenAm Wolfsmantel 33
91058 Erlangen
Germany
Phone +49 (0) 91 31/7 76-0
Fax +49 (0) 91 31/7 76-9 99
Email: info@iis.fhg.de [mailto]
(Interesting: On the English homepage, their postal address doesn't show up - only eMail addresses. On the German homepage, it does.)
Contact Thomson:
Thomson multimedia16935 W. Bernardo Drive # 103
San Diego, CA 92127
USA
Fax: +1.858.451.6916
Email: info@mp3licensing.com [mailto]
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Re: They've got a good racket going... (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're missing a very important fact here: Algorithms as employed in the MP3 format were NOT patentable in many countries when MP3 first showed up and Fraunhofer's reference implementation was published.
I'm really glad that not that many countries have jumped that US "you can patent everything, including algorithms and IP" train even yet.
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Re:i wonder (Score:4, Funny)
AOL did however get into trouble because they tried to use the fact they owned Nullsoft to get out of buying another, see the license wasn't transferable.
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Re:Winamp has been ready for this for a while... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or moderate this posts as +5 Dumb, Redundant?
Winamp (Nullsoft) already paid for the license. They want mindshare, they don't want to collect per client.
Many clients have already paid because this isn't news.
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Re:Probable consequences? (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me when my Apex AD600A or my Rio Volt SP90 will start playing Ogg. Without hardware support, it'll go nowhere. (I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but it most definitely is not there yet.)
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